Seems like a pretty straightforward case of President Bush and his administration misleading the American people...

Skewed Intelligence Data in March to War in Iraq

However, being the right-wing nut job that I am, I must find something to criticize. The only thing I can come up with is that the Times is front-paging this story for the same reason CBS started their National Guard onslaught after the Republican convention even though the story was researched in depth in both 2000 and earlier this year. That is, it's not that this is "news", it's the desire to remind people of the worst of President Bush's mistakes (just in case someone agreed with him in the foreign policy debate).

It took me all of about two minutes to find this document on the internet - The CIA's Aluminum Tubes' Assessment: Is the Nuclear Case Going Down the Tubes? - which was written back in March 2003 with a lot of the same details that the Times reports. For a minute, I actually believed that their reporters spent weeks or months digging up some super classified, never-before-disclosed-to-the-public information.

All I can say is that it's a shame we didn't know about the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars that Saddam was getting via the French and Russians from the oil-for-food program. Then we wouldn't have had to make Saddam's weapon program an issue. It would have been enough to say that he harbors and financially supports terrorists and had enough money to buy already made weapons if they became available. We know he had the money and we know the weapons materials are out there because John Kerry pretty much said that it would take him at least four years to find everything from the ex-Soviet Union alone.

Therefore, my opinion is that we went in to Iraq for the right reasons, but the wrong excuse. If people didn't oppose Bush before the war then it's because they were too lazy or too busy underestimating the intelligence of the American people.

I'm looking forward to what the real right-wing bloggers have to say about this.